This is a series of posts seeking to follow the prompt set forth by David Bentley Hart in his recent lecture posted to his Substack, Leaves in the Wind. I have not linked every single scriptural text for the sake of length.
The Christianity of the future must be one that has come to terms with its past and present, both the successes and the sins. Christianity in the modern world, and in the postmodern world which is still being born, cannot afford to be ignorant, voluntarily or involuntarily, of its true legacy. The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the gift of the life-creating Spirit of God, and the history of the Christian Church, both the laudable and the lamentable, are that legacy. Contemporary Christians are due neither honor nor blame for the facts of that legacy, but by virtue of their Christian belonging, behavior, and belief, they are heirs to that legacy and they are therefore responsible for it, both the good and the bad. Where there is good, contemporary Christians have a responsibility of claiming, conserving, and progressively expanding the good; where there is bad, contemporary Christians have a responsibility of repair (Heb: tikkun) for sins of the past in ways that are substantive and meaningful, that have some kind of real impact, if not of full restoration, then at least of some act of repentance. Christian credibility for the future is going to be predicated on this level of mature self-awareness about our tradition.
The Christianity of the future must be one that is alive to the kerygma of the Kingdom of God, of Jesus Christ as risen and ascended Lord, and of the Spirit of Pentecost, and of the deifying dogmas of Trinity and Incarnation, without triumphalism. Christianity either lives or dies on its ability to continually proclaim the message of Jesus that the Kingdom has drawn near and the message of his followers that the Kingdom has in fact been inaugurated with Jesus’s death, resurrection, ascension, and sending of the Spirit of God upon the community of his disciples. For all of the academic chastity around claims to the supernatural that scholars ought to do when they are writing as scholars, for all of the intellectual honesty that a square read of the historical Jesus considered in his context engenders, for all of the ecumenical and ecumenic openness that Christians can and ought to have towards one another and non-Christians, the fundament of being Christian has been and will remain in perpetuity the confession that Jesus is alive from the dead and that God has made him both Lord and Christ (Acts 2:36), and that God now gives the Spirit in his name. The Church’s dogmatic tradition of naming God the Father, Jesus Christ, and Spirit as consubstantial, coequal, and coeternal Trinity and of naming Jesus Christ as therefore God incarnate, fully divine and fully human, is not the clear, obvious sense of the New Testament in its original context of composition; it is, however, the theological tradition that most clearly saw what it would take for Christ’s salvific power to entail the deification which the New Testament does envision and which all Early Christians valued so deeply and that has served to unite most Christians for the majority of Christian history. These things are at the heart of what it has meant to be Christian. The texts that these beliefs are encoded within and articulated by—the New Testament, the apocryphal Christian texts, the Fathers of the Church, the liturgies, the prayers, the confessions and creeds and canons of Church councils, and the visual “texts” of icons, religious art and architecture, and other holy spaces—are the common Christian inheritance, and they constitute a diverse anthology, spanning geography, culture, and time. For all of the reckoning with the dignity and legitimacy of the non-Christian world that modernity demands, modernity does not rob Christianity of being a tradition, of having value as a tradition. The apocalypse of modernity merely reminds us that the Christian tradition is by the nature of its earliest heraldry, which proclaimed a violently crucified Jew to have been vindicated by God as the world’s true overlord, not triumphalist in character and cannot, in any event, claim triumph unless or until its prophetic hope is fully realized. Indeed, it is the Jesus of the Gospels himself who teaches us not to exercise authority in a manner of domination, in the style of the nations (Matt 20:25), such that even were that hope realized, Christians should not be looking for the glories of triumph so much as the rhetoric of love to convince the world of the logic of hope in the grammar of the Christian Faith. This ethos requires an openness, a receptivity, and even an abdication on the part of Christians to the control of that grammar itself: while Christians can, will, and should continue to teach that particular “rule of faith,” one God the Father, one Lord Jesus Christ, and one Holy Spirit, as the uniquely Christian form of following the Way of Jesus, Christianity’s future in the world, just like its past, will provide the catalyst for many kinds of reception and response to the significance of Jesus that are not always strictly defined by that grammatical landscape. Christians must be willing and able in those cases to look beyond the anxiety of converting others and towards those logical and rhetorical places of convergence where, even among those who do not “speak” grammatically correct Christianity, and Christians should be capable of understanding and speaking in those “grammars,” too. That is to say, Christianity’s future, insofar as it is a return to the earliest kerygmatic spirit of its tradition, must be one where its witness to the world is a witness of dialogue rather than threat or even desire to assimilate or annihilate the other. The language of the apocalyptic milieu of the earliest Jesus Movement which expected imminent conversion and judgment, which cast a dualistic divide between the members of a fledgling movement and those of all other cultures and lifeways, is, while forever a part of Christian Scripture and a possibility of the grammar of Christian faith, not, we ought to have the presence of mind to recognize, still a viable description of a world where Christianity has endured as one world religion among others for two millennia. Moreover, the prospect of adopting Christianity as one’s faith now has two millenia of stigma attached to it for many people and people groups on the basis of historical Christian behavior. Where Christianity is attractive to newcomers, it must be because the kerygma is preached and lived with integrity; where it is embraced, it must be in a dialect intelligible to the communities and cultures where it exists; where it is tolerated, respected, or befriended but not formally adopted, it must be happy with friendship as one tradition, one community among others, and must engage in the kinds of things that good friends do for one another. Here, contemporary Christians are likely to find that the the best premodern Christian models are not those of the established Church of the Roman Empire, but of the Syrian Church which flourished East of the Tigris River in Central, South, and East Asia. From that ancient and noble Christian tradition, today small, beleaguered, and divided, in part due to imperialism from other Christians, all contemporary Christians have yet to learn several key lessons for the modern and postmodern phases of our pilgrimage to the Kingdom of God.
The Christianity of the future must be one that is passionate about realizing the politics of resurrection in its communities and the justice of the Kingdom of God in wider society, without imperialism. If the premodern history of Christianity in the West can tell us anything, it is that, whatever arguments we might wish to have about Christianity’s compatibility or not with empire, the fact of the matter is that Christendom does not work. Any and all attempts to reconstruct Christendom in the present or future will simply result in the same basic problem which eventuated Christendom’s demise: namely, that the freedom demanded by the Gospel and the power required by a state project of cultural regulation are inherently at odds with one another. That God permitted Christendom to fall, to disintegrate, and to become the modern world is a fact that traditionalists and anti-modernists of the Christian present must confront, in order to allow the apocalyptic pedagogy of modernity to take its full effect on their psyche. It is not that Christians of the future ought not to be invested in justice or the common good, and it is not, therefore, that Christians will never be at odds with the larger society about what the common good is. Culture warfare is not often a winning strategy for a faith whose ethical credibility has understandably, even rightly come under fire, and so Christians of the future must be much more careful about which hills they are willing to die on and when something touching the mystery of the human being is at stake versus when something contingent on a particular phase of parochial cultural existence is at stake. Christians must cultivate, as many contemporary Christian voices have called for, once more a living sense of themselves as “strangers and exiles” in the world, as constituting an ethnos that has no worldly patria, a populus with no lasting city here below, whose politeia is in heaven, but which is nevertheless committed to the good of the cities where we dwell in exile (Jer 29:7). This means that Christians of the future will have to be itinerant localists, congruent with the scales human society achieves or loses over time. It will also mean that Christians must be political pragmatists, conscientious, discretionary voters, and unrelenting realists rather than childish idealists. Christians must recognize that in this fallen kosmos, there will be no final realization of the Kingdom of God that can be built up from below which will not also fall to ruin, no Golden Age that will not subside again to Silver and thence to Bronze and Iron, no anacyclotic turn that is irreversible, since anacylosis is simply the political rung of Fortune’s wheel, which ever turns in this mutable realm of existence. Here, Christians should take their cue not only from Christians who have historically lacked political power and have sought to form local communities adherent to the politics of resurrection while also advocating for realistic social change, but also the examples of other religious and philosophical movements connected to but beyond the Christian sphere which have threaded the needle well in societies that are inherently pluralistic and multicultural. Sufis, itinerant Buddhist missionaries, Daoist sages, various forms of Anabaptist collectivism, the Catholic Worker Movement, liberation theologies older and more recent—within and beyond Christianity, Christians have multiple inspirations to draw from for articulating a political ethos that is both engaged and committed to realizing the Good as far as possible for everyone but which is also realistic about the true character of the fallen world and which does not seek to control others, their identities, their bodies, or their activities, especially not in response to their choosing against Christian morality (and especially not when they are not Christians). It is vital to Christianity’s long term success that social projects based on the acquisition and wielding of power be abandoned, for these cannot be aspects of the politics of resurrection which are everywhere defined by the logic of the cross.
The Christianity of the future must be one that provides meaningful community, ethnic reconciliation, cultural diversity, ethical guidance, philosophical wisdom, and profound spiritual mystery to its members. Christianity was popular in the first theaters of its reception not only because of the quality of its message but because of what it offered to people in the cosmopolitan context of the Roman Empire: a transethnic, multigendered, multiclass community not based on kinship ties but which offered the benefits of kinship ties to its members. It was not the only such social entity that offered these chosen familiae or amicable bonds, but its attractiveness was initially in the communistic economics, collectivist identity, and personal empowerment it offered to ordinary people in the Roman Empire. When it became popular among elites, it constituted an attractive philosophical variation to some and not to others, an attractive mystery cult with some claim to antiquity through its connections to Judaism, and a new ethnic identity between Hellenism and Judaism. The exact circumstances of Christianity’s appeal in the ancient Roman Empire cannot today be reproduced exactly, nor should we want them to. But certain subtextual themes can stay with us for the present and the future that do, perhaps, belong to something of the fundaments of what it is to be Christian: Christianity as a chosen family that crosses ethnic and cultural divides and provides thick solidarity, especially in a late modern world where, for certain necessary reasons, states and other social and political organs are encouraged to offer thin cultural identities (but do not always); Christianity as an ethical and moral tradition that, done correctly, has the opportunity to serve as a guide to life in all its specificities, not unlike, say, halakha and mussar in Judaism, or sharia, akhlaq, adab, and ihsan in Islam, but with openness to the present in its diversity and the future in its uncertainty that does not reify tradition in a rigid manner; Christianity as a philosophical tradition, that has the capacity to provide a way of thinking about God, world, and self that in combination with its moral and ritual traditions can facilitate our ascent; and Christianity as a mystery cult, one whose rituals are designed to engender alternative states of consciousness, communion with the divine, and personal transformation, not merely to regulate behavior or to enforce a kind of infantilized casuistry of neurotic personal interrogation of one’s own life and that of others. That is to say, as nearly every significant Christian thinker of the last century has said, Christianity’s only successful future is to the degree that it can reclaim its fundamental identity as a Wisdom tradition. Christ’s three bodies in this tradition—his resurrected, ascended, fully deified body, the body of his teaching, and the body of his ekklesia, his umma, his sangha—are mediated by its ritual and moral apparatus, but these are not themselves the point: communion with God in Christ by the Spirit, deification of the human being, is the point, around which the whole of Christianity ought to be constantly oriented, and from which angle the moralistic calculus of so much contemporary Christianity strikes one as fundamentally antichristic. As a Wisdom school, Christianity is as free as any other Wisdom school to prefer its own methods, its own Teacher and sages, its own lineage to that of others; but it should, as it has often enough in its past, be willing to acknowledge that its own school has many diverse pedagogies and doctrinal pathways, and to submit to peerage among other such schools and ways of life.
The Christianity of the future must be one that embraces diversity and pluralism without the need for authoritarian control or uniformity. Nearly all modern Christians are heirs, knowing or unknowing, willing or unwilling, not just of the history of Christianity but also of the history and effects of Christian division. But modern Christians live well past the time when the sources and logic of these divisions made ample sense to most people and had anything like a sensible justification for their status quo. There is simply no strong reason, at least for all Christians with some kind of direct lineage in the ancient Christian community (Catholics, Chalcedonian Orthodox, non-Chalcedonian Orthodox, the Church of the East, Old Catholics, Anglicans, and the majority of the Protestant world) to entertain divisions in communion that are strongly policed or enforced. At the same time, it is probably unrealistic, after a century of the Ecumenical Movement’s failure to produce it and the inertia of the major Christian bodies about the matter, to envision a Christian future that has something like a single common administrative center, periphery, and organ and that is united in faith and praxis beyond a lowest common denominator token of common belief and behavior, like, say, the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed or the Apostles Creed or something similar. The need to make Christian belief and behavior uniform as a prerequisite to Christian belonging is fundamentally a product of the triumphalistic and imperialistic attitudes of the Christian past that Christians of the present and future must learn to abandon from the apocalypse of modernity. It is not that anyone has to stop having, or starting having, councils, or theological dialogues, or signed agreements, or anything of the sort. It is that the final goal cannot simply be that everyone signs on to some new constitution and locally implements a program of being Christian from above. As Pope Francis realizes and has instigated the synodal path in an attempt to make it manifest, the Church’s mystery is one that has to involve the local, the regional, and the universal working in tandem with one another, without the exercise of primacy over against the will of the majority at any of those levels. When this logic is applied beyond the sectarian boundaries of contemporary Christians, it becomes clear that the whole of Christ’s ecclesial body can only act in common with all of its members, and so where genuine consensus is lacking, it cannot be manufactured or imposed. Here Christians have something to learn from the other traditions of the world which, while they reflect many of the same imperialistic attempts to control the doctrine and practice of their intramural competitors (consider, for example, historic infighting between Sunnis and Shias, or contemporary hatred of Wahhabis for Sufis), also frequently achieve a kind of pluralism that acknowledges shared identity across sectarian boundaries and seeks to honor, affirm, learn from, and integrate what each finds good in the other at present, saving the final unification for some later date. Receptive ecumenism in the Christian world already does this, and at its best, this is how inter-Christian encounter will happen. Sacramentally speaking, Christians in the Catholic and Orthodox world should begin to consider that the bar they have set for shared communion is both too high and relatively modern: recognition of sacramental validity and right to commune across sectarian boundaries has more of a venerable history than either has pretended in the modern Ecumenical Movement, and there is minimally no reason that any contemporaneously and validly baptized Christian who believes in the Trinity and the Incarnation should be denied the Eucharist at any liturgy or sacramental reconciliation, unction, marriage, etc. in any context. Churches may wish to save ordination for their own members who are committed to their particular tradition and lineage…but is there not also something glorious, Christians ought to imagine, and weighty about the possibilities that open up in the sharing of clergy, ordination across boundaries, empowerment of laypeople across contexts? The way past the impasse of the Ecumenical Movement is to reconsider the terms of its engagement. Christians of the present and future must craft an intentional sense of living Christian pluralism, of Pan-Christianism, akin to the pluralistic ethos of Modern Judaism, much Modern Islam, and other modern iterations of premodern faiths, like Hinduism and Buddhism.
The Christianity of the future must be one that speaks with authentic humility and love to the world, and is willing to listen to and confess what it does not already know. The fundamental thing that modernity teaches Christianity intellectually is that its tradition, like other traditions, does not possess sufficient resources for expertise in every kind of knowledge. Premodern Christianity and its sources of faith is not an infallible authority on science or history, even its own history, and the philosophical and cosmological visions of the Christian Tradition are, while powerful and illuminating, not complete, and are not claimed to be complete by their classical sources. Christians of the present and future, engaging not only with Christians but with religious and philosophical others, should be open to the idea not only that they are looking for what they already know in the experience and tradition of the other, but, as Anantanand Rambachan has rightly said on many occasions now, that they are looking for what they do not already know and for ways of integrating it. Yes, that means that Christianity at its best is a richly syncretistic tradition, but it always has been: from the integration of Stoic, Middle, and Neoplatonic Greco-Roman philosophy in the earliest Christian centuries, to Christian inculturation in the cultures of South and East Asia during the missions of the Church of the East, to the contemporary appropriation of the natural sciences for theological contemplation, Christianity is in its essence a faith that is always thinking and speaking with the world, that is always progressively reasoning its way towards a larger vision of reality. That will mean in the present and future deep Christian listening not only to religious and philosophical and cultural and moral others where some compatibility is perhaps easily intuited but also and especially those where it is not easily intuited. Christians of the future must have Marian hearts: alive, alert, listening, and pondering (Lk 2:19) before speaking.
The Christianity of the future must be a Wayfaring community, aware that its journey towards the farther shore of the Kingdom of God will never conclude in this world and that, even in the next, the journey into the divine infinity is a ceaseless epektasis. I might summarize each of these observations in the following way: a rebuilt Christianity sufficiently chastened by the modern apocalypse is one that understands its fundamental identity as that of a pilgrim community, a nomadic community, a tradition whose ethos is one in transition, surfing or sailing or walking the unfolding of infinite divine possibility in the creaturely realm, seeking to progress as far as possible in this life and after into the divine mystery, while knowing that God’s own infinity is one that is insurmountable and unfathomable, one that we will always be viatores in and into. Liberation, moksha, nirvana, from the Christian perspective, the arrival of everyone and all things at that “farther shore” where Christ awaits us with breakfast (Jn 21:12), is not a historical event, nor even a final stasis, for the one who calls us forth from the great sea of this world to dine with him on the shore of the next one also asks us then to follow him until he comes (21:22). Christianity’s is also the bodhisattva ideal, of achieving enlightenment and then remaining in the world for the sake of the world, until all beings reach liberation, while knowing that because God’s act of creation is unceasing and eternal, because there will always be more beings, there will always be more worlds, there will always be more children of God coming to be in and through Christ, that our participation in God’s act of consummating creation, both by our own deification and by our service to our brothers and sisters, never ceases either. There will be no count of the eons in which we continue journeying into the Kingdom of God: that is the Kingdom of God, at least as Christ has revealed it to us, for all this is the Kingdom of God, the realm in which God is always seeking to realize his reign in and through Christ by the ever-breezing Spirit (3:8). Christians must come to understand themselves as servants of that Trinitarian oikonomia, but not the only servants, and certainly not as the masters. Christians are instead Wayfarers alongside other Wayfarers into God: those who are learning to journey in imitation of Christ by the logic of the cross and the politics of resurrection, who are becoming, as the late, great Kallistos Ware used to say, progressively aware of a mystery, who are called to meet the risen Lord in the Galilee that ever recedes from our sight, who are sent out from Jerusalem into the world only to lead all the world back to Zion again, who are, indeed, called out from the safety of their vessel to meet Christ walking on the waters of history (Matt 14:28-36). And so Christians must realize that they have faced this juncture of death and resurrection before, and they are very likely to do so again: no synthesis will be permanent, for no context will be permanent: all they can do, all we can do, is keep finding the subtext that continues to make the text of the Gospel, in which Jesus says “Come, follow me” (Matt 4:19), the text of the apostolic kerygma of the Kingdom of God and of Jesus as risen Messiah, Son of God, and Lord, meaningful in the ever-changing varieties of historical contexts in which we have and shall yet find ourselves.
Thank you for the deep response to such a pressing prompt -particularly the extended metaphor of this mysterious fount whose world-flooding outpour spills over the far corners of our cosmos and yet culminates with Christ on the shore serving breakfast (the actual scene of which is a personal favorite). While the seven part scroll as a whole has been encyclopedic (on the enjoyable order of Williams' "Descent of the Dove"), it has also been at times a meditation, even skiffing at certain touch points on that tepid surface where I can't help but think many of us find ourselves wading with DBH's prompt, sitting in agreement and awe at the propositions put to words, that liminal space where plunges action or floats interiority. To those who would say, "This is all very well, but what do we *do", I wonder if there is one such place in the 3rd part of this, your 7th installment mailed (sic) to the church door. I'm taken by this loaded phrase (which has echos from the lofty halls of Agamben to the devotional pamphlets of N.T. Wright and the like), and I'm compelled to submerge the "politics of resurrection" into something like "activism of the Way". Wave upon wave, a unified "christian" response to the issues that threaten our world is dashed and divided over politically crafted rocks like ProLife-ProChoice, but might we shift the field from imperial participation to humble subversion of a broken system if we gave a clear grammar that beaconed brighter than such barking dualisms (e.g. working to build support systems for the disenfranchised who find themselves in the position to abort, rather than punishing them)? A good branding consultant might say it more like, "Christians need clear messaging". We need a compelling language/grammar (voice) that cuts through left and right, a third "Way." Absent of this we are perhaps still sailing the question (which is also necessary, for sure) rather than channeling the waters which lead to that Galilean shore.